For that, OA sent out a little over 192,000 surveys to the customers of 36 of its member companies. They returned a response rate of 5.9%, or around 11,000 replies. I don’t know if that’s considered a healthy percentage or not. It leaves us to ask, “What about the other 94.1? What do they think?” and to wonder what motivated the eleven thousand to go the trouble of answering. Still,11,000 isn’t none, and OA reports that among the respondents, 12% were first-timers, new to opera; further, that this includes “Record levels of first-time attendance at most companies.” (Once more, no hard numbers.) ^(I) The OA report breaks down the survey answers in several interesting ways. Since the present topic is qualification for the repertory, the very first conclusion drawn pops out, namely, that among the 12%, the majority (percentage not specified) select a standard-repertory opera for their first experience, and prefer to see it in a traditional, period production. This perhaps reflects little more than name recognition, the safer choice of something pre-approved over something chancier. Nor has there yet been time for follow-up, to see what proportion of the first-timers become regulars, and how their tastes in repertoire and production style change, or don’t.^(II) But with all due allowance for those unknowns, when Marc Scorca, the experienced and dedicated President and CEO of Opera America, states while writing of the diversification of repertoire in his introduction to the Field Report, that ” . . . these new works are a driver of new audiences and a key to redefining opera as a thriving aspect of contemporary American culture,” I am yet again stymied. The evidence of the past sixty years indicates that they drive nothing, and that rather than redefining the artform (were previous definitions lacking?), they have only tended to un-define it.

There is much more to chew over in these reports. If you have access to them, dive in and see what your own reactions are. Meanwhile, I have a few thoughts on the question always implied in such explorations, and that is, how whatever money that may become available may best be directed. To start, I think one fact must be faced: for all sorts of reasons, this simply isn’t a propitious time for operatic creation—Europe itself, cradle of the artform, is doing no better (though rather differently) than the Americas in that regard—and the issue cannot be forced from the top down, especially when cluttered with subsidiary agendas. In our current political climate, it’s natural to want to dig in to defend these agendas, inasmuch as they are not only being indiscriminately threatened along with much else, but specifically targeted out of ignorant malevolence. I think that would be an unfortunate jerk of the knee. Some babies should go out with the bath water. So: enough with the preferential grants and commissions for women and LGBT, etc., persons. If there is one gender-identified group whose increased participation in opera should be sought in any and all capacities and whose influence might be salutary, that would be the heterosexual male,^(III) who in a drawn-out process has more or less self-canceled after some “coercive persuasion” (a term now in use in discussions on brainwashing), and/or simply as an elective affinity. But please, I am not plugging for an affirmative-action redistribution in that direction, either.